Round the Corner: Pawnbroking in the Victorian Novel Jennifer Tate Becker Washington University in St
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Summer 9-1-2014 Round the Corner: Pawnbroking in the Victorian Novel Jennifer Tate Becker Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Becker, Jennifer Tate, "Round the Corner: Pawnbroking in the Victorian Novel" (2014). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1286. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1286 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: William McKelvy, Chair Miriam Bailin Guinn Batten Matthew Erlin Lynne Tatlock “Round the Corner”: Pawnbroking in the Victorian Novel by Jennifer Tate Becker A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University for partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2014 St. Louis, Missouri Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction: Looking “Round the Corner” 2 Chapter 1: Dickens and the “Strange Mutability” of the Pawn Shop 24 Chapter 2: “What might, perhaps, have been expected”: Thackeray’s 83 Pledging and Social Speculation Chapter 3: “You do not think what it is”: Love and Pledging in Trollope’s 136 Mercenary Marriages Chapter 4: “It puts you in connection with the word at large ”: Pawnbroking and 181 Vocation in Eliot Chapter 5: “Things to Put Away”: The Pledgers of Gissing and Moore’s 212 Urban Underworlds Conclusion: “All the flotsam and jetsam of human lives”: Value and Inclusion 259 in the Eclectic Pawn Shop Appendix A: The Victorian Pawnbroking Transaction 280 Appendix B: Pawnbroking Language 282 Appendix C: Illustrations 283 Works Cited 288 ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the Council of Independent Colleges, whose generous support enabled travel and archival research for this dissertation. iii For John, who thought it was a good idea. iv “The History of Pawnbroking, written in popular style, would be an attractive work to all lovers of railway bookstalls, or American novels.” -T. Turner, 1864 1 Introduction Looking “Round the Corner” “It’s more about money than anything else,” explains Bella Wilfer about the book she is reading in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) (205). As readers of Victorian literature know, the same statement might be applied to almost any novel of the period, as they so often record the accumulation, circulation, and loss of money.1 A young person’s diligent efforts to overcome financial disadvantages to arrive at prosperity and happiness; the competition among family and friends to secure a portion of a vast estate; a family’s struggle to keep up appearances despite financial ruin through unwise investments or a failed business: these are some of the nineteenth century’s most familiar storylines. Victorian novels typically abound in specific information about characters’ income and expenses, because such details are crucial to a character’s identity and progress (Shrimpton 32). During the nineteenth century it became increasingly the case that money, not birth, shaped one’s sense of self-worth and enabled social success, and the Victorian novel reflects this new reality. While the story of one’s life was largely the story of one’s money, the concept of “money” was open to interpretation and debate among the Victorians. The nineteenth century was a period of great change in the way that money was made, exchanged, and experienced. The most fundamental change was that wealth was increasingly measured not by land or material resources, but by capital, which likely could not be directly perceived (Financial 2). Even as 1 Simon James notes, “While Victorian literature tries to resist the idea of money as a moral telos for its characters, it is rarely able to establish an imaginative world that is capable of functioning entirely without money . it is still needed by realist fiction to oil the wheels of its plot mechanics” (2). 2 paper money stood in for gold, other written documents signifying an individual’s credit frequently took the place of currency, making wealth something that had to be, so to speak, imagined (2). Neither could currency necessarily be considered a secure symbol of real wealth. The wars against France which began in the late eighteenth century had depleted the nation’s coin and bullion supply, and from 1797 until 1821 the Bank of England stopped gold payments on silver coins and paper money, making credit “virtually the only available means of exchange” (9). The question of whether the nation should adhere to a strict gold standard with all or most paper bills backed by gold, or whether paper currency should be produced as trade required, was debated for many years until the 1844 Bank Charter Act limited paper money (Shrimpton 23-24). The spread of paper currency made forgery more common, increasing public suspicion of these new forms of financial exchange. Fraudulent activity was also common in the stock market. The London Stock Exchange was formed in 1801 and grew rapidly throughout the century, although financial panics were common and many people remained suspicious of investing (Poovey, Financial 15, 18). Dishonest trading was a serious problem; it was not unusual for a “promoter” to acquire investors for a “company” that would soon be liquidated – a situation that Trollope explores in The Way We Live Now (1875) (18). Besides uneasiness about the stability and trustworthiness of the financial system, Victorians experienced a moral conflict between the traditional disdain for “Mammon” and the recognition of the necessity of having and making money in the modern age (Shrimpton 27). Victorian writing’s preoccupation with money and personal wealth, and its depiction of capital, panics, investors, creditors, banks, and the stock market, can be seen as an effort to understand the underlying principles of this confusing and troubling, yet vital financial world that was taking shape (Poovey, Financial 4-5). 3 One flourishing institution which received much attention in Parliament and the press was the pawn shop, perhaps because it encapsulated, in a small, local, and visible way, some of the basic issues at stake in the rather vast and largely abstract financial world. Lending money on the security of pledges is a practice dating back thousands of years, and pawnbroking as we understand it today became institutionalized during the Middle Ages. But during the nineteenth century, pawnbroking experienced its most rapid expansion as a place to obtain easy credit needed to make ends meet. In 1826, there were 269 pawn shop licenses in Great Britain; by 1890 that number had swollen to 4,433, and it grew every year until after 1914 (Minkes 18). It was to be pawnbroking’s “golden age” (Hudson 53). The pawn shop is an interesting aspect of the Victorian financial system for the way that, unlike the money market, it dealt in hard goods and cash. It was seemingly transparent and simple, which held great appeal for those with little money; some people, placing more trust in the neighborhood pawn shop than the local bank, pawned valuables and even cash and coins simply for safekeeping (Tebbutt 17-18). Still, there were ample opportunities for pawnbrokers and customers alike to engage in fraudulent activity with unfair interest rates and stolen goods. The pawn shop had its advantages over the bank or the stock market, but it was not an entirely risk-free source of cash. During the Victorian period the pawn shop was moving from the fringes of British financial operations to the mainstream. Pawnbroking had long been shunned by the more prosperous and pious, who did not believe usury a subject worth discussing. But as the number of shops increased in the growing cities around Great Britain, pawnbroking became something that required more attention. Middle-class reformers, often drawing on theologically inspired condemnations of moneylending, decried pawnbrokers as ruthless predators of the desperate, uneducated lower classes. Some called for outlawing the practice entirely, believing it led to 4 drunkenness and ruin. Yet the need for ready money to meet basic needs, especially for those without access to other forms of credit, made pawnbrokers indispensible. Seeing themselves as discreet benefactors to those in financial distress, Victorian pawnbrokers formed trade associations and lobbied for sensible regulations and more respect from the public. While reformers penned pamphlets making their case against the trade, pawnbrokers and their sympathizers took to the press to defend the business against misunderstandings and prejudices. Pawnbroking became subject to much Parliamentary scrutiny. The stipulations of the landmark Pawnbrokers Acts of 1800 and 1872, as well as the numerous other laws touching on the trade passed during the Victorian era, reflect the cautious trust of lawmakers as they reconciled themselves to the fact that regulation, not prohibition, was the best way to approach pawnbroking. The regulations set by the Victorians, with a few twentieth-century adjustments, would govern the business until the Consumer Credit Act of 1974 (Hudson 35).2 There is a staggering amount of